Likely to be a case of cost cutting indeed. It's the same situation with the AOC monitor I've been using right now. Whenever I print a document or two, the printer causes the desk to shake up as if there's an earthquake. I've been thinking of having my dad weld or bolt on a brace to make things a little more stable.

I remember the AOC monitor I used to have being wobbly, and that was before I moved. It would have been horrible if I paired it with my already light computer desk, so perhaps I should be thankful the Dell isn't as wobbly as the AOC was. Perhaps in the future I can save up for an actual computer desk instead of this light thing I'm using right now.

And.. it's 2018. There wasn't that many people on my Facebook feed wishing 2017 were up and done with unlike 2016, though perhaps I just missed it all and my circle of friends just didn't complain much.

One of my video game wishes for 2018 is to finally start a Pokémon game. I obviously can't play every single one since it would be nearly impossible, and also because some of the games were later remade for newer systems. I may start with Pokémon Sun and Moon or X and Y. I'm still reading various forums to see which game is beginner friendly.

(01-09-2018, 07:29 AM)huckleberrypie Wrote: Funny how you can get two $60 games on Steam for less than half the price. Dad and I managed to score both Dirt 4 and Dirt Rally just recently, and 'twas a good buy.

Steam really does know how to do sales. I get notifications every now and then of certain games on my wish list that go on sale, and the prices are usually deeply discounted.

I wish Nintendo did the same. :/ You can still find big-ticket Wii U games for $60, despite Walmart not selling the consoles anymore! The only exceptions are shovelware and Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival, which Nintendo really wants to get rid of following it's poor critical reception.

As for the eShop, their latest sales only go to 30% off. Big-ticket games only end up getting $10 or so shaved off the price, while VC games get really small cuts at around $1.50 or so.

My latest video game adventure is Super Mario Galaxy 2. I'm about halfway through, and while it is great fun, it pales somewhat in comparison to the first game. The course maps are more linear and the plot has been reduced back to the standard "Save Princess Peach"... IN SPACE!! While this story was also the ExcusePlot of the first game, it added on a very deep story regarding an entirely new character which I thought was a breath of fresh air.

Apparently, Shigeru Miyamoto didn't want the devs to put a story in the sequel thinking it would be a distraction, and instead had them focus on the gameplay. Seeing as how the first Mario Galaxy game scored high marks upon release, Miyamoto is clearly wrong. Games with deep stories can still be fun to play if the story and gameplay are well balanced.

I'm also going to pop in my old Animal Crossing City Folk game disc. I believe it's nearly been two years since I last played that game, and I'm curious as to how blighted my old town has become. I will also struggle with the controls since I'm so used to New Leaf on 3DS.

(01-09-2018, 07:29 AM)huckleberrypie Wrote: Funny how you can get two $60 games on Steam for less than half the price. Dad and I managed to score both Dirt 4 and Dirt Rally just recently, and 'twas a good buy.

Steam really does know how to do sales. I get notifications every now and then of certain games on my wish list that go on sale, and the prices are usually deeply discounted.

I wish Nintendo did the same. :/ You can still find big-ticket Wii U games for $60, despite Walmart not selling the consoles anymore! The only exceptions are shovelware and Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival, which Nintendo really wants to get rid of following it's poor critical reception.

As for the eShop, their latest sales only go to 30% off. Big-ticket games only end up getting $10 or so shaved off the price, while VC games get really small cuts at around $1.50 or so.

My latest video game adventure is Super Mario Galaxy 2. I'm about halfway through, and while it is great fun, it pales somewhat in comparison to the first game. The course maps are more linear and the plot has been reduced back to the standard "Save Princess Peach"... IN SPACE!! While this story was also the ExcusePlot of the first game, it added on a very deep story regarding an entirely new character which I thought was a breath of fresh air.

Apparently, Shigeru Miyamoto didn't want the devs to put a story in the sequel thinking it would be a distraction, and instead had them focus on the gameplay. Seeing as how the first Mario Galaxy game scored high marks upon release, Miyamoto is clearly wrong. Games with deep stories can still be fun to play if the story and gameplay are well balanced.

I'm also going to pop in my old Animal Crossing City Folk game disc. I believe it's nearly been two years since I last played that game, and I'm curious as to how blighted my old town has become. I will also struggle with the controls since I'm so used to New Leaf on 3DS.

Shame the big N hasn't gone that route, and I still can't get over Nintendo's weird and bone-headed ambivalence towards their fan base, like clamping down on fan games and unfair treatment of those showing gameplay footage.

And I also had to blanket-ban all DigitalOcean IP addresses as there has been an extensive and continued history of abuse from said host. Apparently those spammers are running bots through VPS or cloud servers hosted by the company. This may have the unintended side effect of those using proxies hosted by DigitalOcean to be blocked, but for the time being I have no other choice but to do such a drastic measure.

MyBB's support rules state that anyone hosting hate speech, doxxing or warez would end up being denied support, so we defo have to be careful with this no-warez or sensitive content mandate, as we'd be no better off than a website operator running a nulled script then.

Greta, my old laptop, still works, but she seems to take a long time to start up even though I hardly have anything installed and AFAIK, her startup list in Windows is pretty clean.

Given her Intel B960 CPU and 8gb RAM, would an SSD help boost performance? I am considering upgrading her to an SSD at some point since her current hard drive is the original from 2012. It's 320GB in size, and since I only use her sparingly these days, the SSD doesn't need to be any bigger than that.

(02-11-2018, 09:43 AM)cpd2009 Wrote: Greta, my old laptop, still works, but she seems to take a long time to start up even though I hardly have anything installed and AFAIK, her startup list in Windows is pretty clean.

Given her Intel B960 CPU and 8gb RAM, would an SSD help boost performance? I am considering upgrading her to an SSD at some point since her current hard drive is the original from 2012. It's 320GB in size, and since I only use her sparingly these days, the SSD doesn't need to be any bigger than that.

A 240GB SSD shouldn't hurt, but given how they're expensive by the byte compared to them platters...

In other news, it looks like converting a regular LeapFrog Epic to an Academy Edition unit is indeed trivial. Same partition layout so flashing a signed Academy ROM to a vanilla Epic should be golden.

Well... while talking to my mom over Skype just now, I learned the backlight in her LG 42'' HDTV has gone dead, though it has been showing signs of problems ever since it was mounted on an integrated bracket in a TV stand. Before mounting, the backlight was fine. After mounting, it appeared some of the backlight elements were pressing on the LCD panel as there were these weird circles that can be seen in certain solid colored scenes. Then said circles started flickering shortly before I moved away.

And today, it appears the entire backlight array has failed, leaving a black picture while sound can still be heard. Occasionally, the backlight will come on for a short time before failing again.

For what it's worth, the set has an LED backlight array and it was purchased in 2015. I don't think it was a defect in the LED array. I believe it was mounted too tightly to the VESA bracket in the TV stand since said LED issues started happening after mounting occurred. Either way, it will likely be cheaper to buy a new set than to repair the old one since it's out of warranty at this point.

As for my Sansui 40'' TV I purchased the same year? It still works great, and when I got a TV stand, I refused to get one with an integrated VESA mount. I may be overreacting, but I really don't trust VESA mounts anymore after the issues observed with my mom's LG.